Edward Hopper: A Surprise Star in France

Edward Hopper,
the American realist artist known for his paintings of postwar urban America, has never been a favorite of the French: Not a single Hopper painting hangs permanently in a museum in France.

Nevertheless, a major Hopper retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris is poised to become one of France's biggest art exhibitions of all time.

Less than halfway through its 100-day run, which ends Jan. 28, the Hopper show has attracted more than 365,000 people. That puts it on track to overtake "Picasso and the Masters" in 2009, which was visited by 783,000. The only French art exhibit to have more visitors was a retrospective of
Claude Monet
that attracted 910,000 visitors and ended in January 2011.

The show's success has taken many in Paris by surprise. But it's a vindication of the vision of curator
Didier Ottinger,
who is also deputy director of the Centre Pompidou, home of Paris's permanent modern art collections. Mr. Ottinger acknowledges that the appeal of Hopper's work isn't immediately obvious in a country which has tended to be snooty about American realist art. Abstract work by the likes of
Mark Rothko
or
Jackson Pollock,
whose roots go back to French avant-garde artists like
Marcel Duchamp
and
Georges Braque,
has tended to be more highly regarded.

Hopper "doesn't belong to the small group of artists well known by the general public, like Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin or
Frida Kahlo,
" said Mr. Ottinger at his office, opposite the Centre Pompidou.

Moreover, "only one or two of his paintings are well known, like 'Nighthawks' or 'House by the Railroad,' " Mr. Ottinger notes, "and yet we have a blockbuster show on our hands."

The curator attributes Hopper's appeal today to several factors, including the universality of American culture.

"He belongs to that school of philosophy that wanted to exalt the ordinary, the daily," Mr. Ottinger says. "The paintings are deceptively simple…but they are full of sophisticated art references."

Indeed, one of the Paris show's strengths is demonstrating the different traditions Hopper's later work drew on. After spending time in Paris in the early 1900s, where he was heavily influenced by French Impressionist painters, Hopper later became an accomplished a commercial illustrator. A small selection of monochrome engravings reveals another side of his abilities, presaging images you might find in postwar comics and graphic novels, the latter famously popular in France.

Mr. Ottinger says that Hopper also has a particular resonance in France given its "frustrated" but enduring love affair with American culture. It's perhaps no coincidence that aging French rock 'n' roll star
Johnny Hallyday
has a song titled "Un tableau de Hopper" on his latest album.

"If the appeal of Hopper is so universal, then it is because American culture is universal," Mr. Ottinger said. "But the subtlety here is that Hopper isn't necessarily the one who exalts the virtues and values of the America of the 20th century, he's almost the one who makes the opposite case: silence, solitude, contemplation."

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